This week, we're publishing our interview with Andrew, the founder of Happy Tezos, who has also contributed to several interesting projects in the Tezos ecosystem such as Tezos Domains, Dappetizer and TezGraph. Andrew has been working closely with Tezos since the very beginning, so we were very curious about the opinions of someone so familiar with this blockchain.
1. Can you tell us a little bit about Happy Tezos?
Well, we were there since the beginning, running since June or July 2018, so that’s 4 years. We were among the first to be on the (Tezos) alphanet. For us, Tezos was the first PoS chain and it was where we began doing validation. Now we operate on multiple chains, but in terms of development, we work mostly with Tezos.
Our projects are
Tezos Domains - which allows users to get a name like alice.tez and use it throughout the Tezos ecosystem instead of the native Tezos address tz1VBLpuDKMoJuHRLZ4HrCgRuiLpEr7zZx2E.
Dappetizer - which is a framework for indexing smart contracts on Tezos. It is powered by Taquito and TypeScript/JavaScript. It provides a ready-made module for indexing FA1.2/FA2 tokens. We’ve also published a public API that exposes the indexed data from the token indexer built on top of Dappetizer.
We also worked on TezGraph in cooperation with the ECAD Labs. TezGraph is a GraphQL-based API to query and subscribe to data from Tezos blockchain.
2. Why are you personally interested in cryptocurrencies and/or Blockchain?
I started looking into blockchains back in the day with Bitcoin. What I liked the most about Tezos was that it was the first PoS chain, and it has the ability to seamlessly upgrade with on-chain governance. Nowadays we only focus on blockchain development and proof-of-stake validation, and it has been that way for the past 3-4 years.
3. What was your first experience with crypto-currency or blockchain?
With cryptocurrencies, I don’t really know (laughs) it has been so long, really. My first experience with Tezos was after reading the whitepaper in 2018 and I participated in the ICO. Then we created the HappyTezos baker. We already hosted a few projects back then, so it was relatively easy for us to start as we already had servers and infrastructure in place, we just added a bit more to our stack.
4. What do you currently consider to be the best blockchain project and why?
We have experience with running nodes on 12+ different chains, but there are specific problems with each one of them. Optimism isn’t running too well (as we just witness with the recent airdrop), Arbitrum gets stuck every other week, the sequencer isn’t decentralized, BSC is impossible to manage properly (from the node operation point of view), because they are flooded with transactions, same with Polygon, Solana, that’s a chapter in itself. I don’t think we are quite at the point where people don’t realize it is all running on blockchain.
5. If you could change one thing about blockchain and crypto in general, what would it be?
Probably creating a UX for ‘normal users’ on most applications, I still think it's too complicated for most of the public.
So masking the complexity?
Yes, exactly
6. What would you like to see implemented in blockchain? Either in your own project, in your favorite blockchain, or in blockchain in general.
There’s this trade-off between scaling solutions and decentralization. If someone comes up with a scaling solution that would preserve decentralization in layer 1, that could probably become the holy grail. However, I don’t see that in existing solutions. This is the main reason rollups are becoming quite popular.
6. What is a question you most often ask in relation to cryptocurrencies and blockchain?
I don’t think I have something like that
7. What is your most common problem with blockchains/cryptocurrencies?
I can’t really think of just one thing, I would rather say that it is difficult to prioritize just one issue - there’s always something new, every chain we are operating a node on, either validating directly or we use the RPC for other applications, each of them has its own set of challenges, there is no chain that works 100%.
8. Where do you see the strongest use case for blockchain?
If we’re talking about Bitcoin, then it’s sending money to anyone, anywhere, cheap and fast.
If we’re talking about Ethereum and other smart contract platforms, there are many more use cases.
However, it’s still very early, so we don’t know what use case exactly will be the use case for blockchain.
We’re still at the beginning of it all, just as like when the Internet started, people didn’t realize we’d be, for example, ordering food via the internet and so on.
9. Where do you see the future of blockchain?
I would say that I see it in a multi-chain approach, every chain will be specific, specializing in different things. Users will be able to seamlessly transfer assets from one chain to another. One will be cheap for transactions, others for NFTs, others will be good for trading financial assets, or there will be better exchanges. So yeah, I think there will be many chains, and each will have its own specific use cases
We appreciate Andrew for sharing his opinions with us and our readers. Looking to delegate your Tezos funds to an excellent delegation service run by experienced people? Check out Happy Tezos. You might also be interested in getting your own custom Tezos name on Tezos Domains, the smart contract indexing framework known as Dappetizer, or TezGraph, an open-source API that provides access to historic and real-time Tezos blockchain data.
Do you know of an interesting blockchain project that would be interested in having an interview with us? Feel free to send me an email, we’d love to hear your thoughts and publish them on our blog.